Detection of Digital Facial Retouching utilizing Face Beauty Information

Facial retouching to beautify images is widely spread in social media, advertisements, and it is even applied in professional photo studios to let individuals appear younger, remove wrinkles and skin impurities. Generally speaking, this is done to enhance beauty. This is not a problem itself, but when retouched images are used as biometric samples and enrolled in a biometric system, it is one. Since previous work has proven facial retouching to be a challenge for face recognition systems,the detection of facial retouching becomes increasingly necessary. This work proposes to study and analyze changes in beauty assessment algorithms of retouched images, assesses different feature extraction methods based on artificial intelligence in order to improve retouching detection, and evaluates whether face beauty can be exploited to enhance the detection rate. In a scenario where the attacking retouching algorithm is unknown, this work achieved 1.1% D-EER on single image detection.

Modular Neural Image Signal Processing

This paper presents a modular neural image signal processing (ISP) framework that processes raw inputs and renders high-quality display-referred images. Unlike prior neural ISP designs, our method introduces a high degree of modularity, providing full control over multiple intermediate stages of the rendering process.~This modular design not only achieves high rendering accuracy but also improves scalability, debuggability, generalization to unseen cameras, and flexibility to match different user-preference styles. To demonstrate the advantages of this design, we built a user-interactive photo-editing tool that leverages our neural ISP to support diverse editing operations and picture styles. The tool is carefully engineered to take advantage of the high-quality rendering of our neural ISP and to enable unlimited post-editable re-rendering. Our method is a fully learning-based framework with variants of different capacities, all of moderate size (ranging from ~0.5 M to ~3.9 M parameters for the entire pipeline), and consistently delivers competitive qualitative and quantitative results across multiple test sets. Watch the supplemental video at: https://youtu.be/ByhQjQSjxVM

Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation on Aerial Photos

Referring expression segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision that integrates natural language understanding with precise visual localization of target regions. Considering aerial imagery (e.g., modern aerial photos collected through drones, historical photos from aerial archives, high-resolution satellite imagery, etc.) presents unique challenges because spatial resolution varies widely across datasets, the use of color is not consistent, targets often shrink to only a few pixels, and scenes contain very high object densities and objects with partial occlusions. This work presents Aerial-D, a new large-scale referring expression segmentation dataset for aerial imagery, comprising 37,288 images with 1,522,523 referring expressions that cover 259,709 annotated targets, spanning across individual object instances, groups of instances, and semantic regions covering 21 distinct classes that range from vehicles and infrastructure to land coverage types. The dataset was constructed through a fully automatic pipeline that combines systematic rule-based expression generation with a Large Language Model (LLM) enhancement procedure that enriched both the linguistic variety and the focus on visual details within the referring expressions. Filters were additionally used to simulate historic imaging conditions for each scene. We adopted the RSRefSeg architecture, and trained models on Aerial-D together with prior aerial datasets, yielding unified instance and semantic segmentation from text for both modern and historical images. Results show that the combined training achieves competitive performance on contemporary benchmarks, while maintaining strong accuracy under monochrome, sepia, and grainy degradations that appear in archival aerial photography. The dataset, trained models, and complete software pipeline are publicly available at https://luispl77.github.io/aerial-d .

GeoVista: Web-Augmented Agentic Visual Reasoning for Geolocalization

Current research on agentic visual reasoning enables deep multimodal understanding but primarily focuses on image manipulation tools, leaving a gap toward more general-purpose agentic models. In this work, we revisit the geolocalization task, which requires not only nuanced visual grounding but also web search to confirm or refine hypotheses during reasoning. Since existing geolocalization benchmarks fail to meet the need for high-resolution imagery and the localization challenge for deep agentic reasoning, we curate GeoBench, a benchmark that includes photos and panoramas from around the world, along with a subset of satellite images of different cities to rigorously evaluate the geolocalization ability of agentic models. We also propose GeoVista, an agentic model that seamlessly integrates tool invocation within the reasoning loop, including an image-zoom-in tool to magnify regions of interest and a web-search tool to retrieve related web information. We develop a complete training pipeline for it, including a cold-start supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage to learn reasoning patterns and tool-use priors, followed by a reinforcement learning (RL) stage to further enhance reasoning ability. We adopt a hierarchical reward to leverage multi-level geographical information and improve overall geolocalization performance. Experimental results show that GeoVista surpasses other open-source agentic models on the geolocalization task greatly and achieves performance comparable to closed-source models such as Gemini-2.5-flash and GPT-5 on most metrics.

Eye Care You: Voice Guidance Application Using Social Robot for Visually Impaired People

In the study, the device of social robot was designed for visually impaired users, and along with a mobile application for provide functions to assist their lives. Both physical and mental conditions of visually impaired users are considered, and the mobile application provides functions: photo record, mood lift, greeting guest and today highlight. The application was designed for visually impaired users, and uses voice control to provide a friendly interface. Photo record function allows visually impaired users to capture image immediately when they encounter danger situations. Mood lift function accompanies visually impaired users by asking questions, playing music and reading articles. Greeting guest function answers to the visitors for the inconvenient physical condition of visually impaired users. In addition, today highlight function read news including weather forecast, daily horoscopes and daily reminder for visually impaired users. Multiple tools were adopted for developing the mobile application, and a website was developed for caregivers to check statues of visually impaired users and for marketing of the application.

Multi-Text Guided Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Recent CLIP-based few-shot semantic segmentation methods introduce class-level textual priors to assist segmentation by typically using a single prompt (e.g., a photo of class). However, these approaches often result in incomplete activation of target regions, as a single textual description cannot fully capture the semantic diversity of complex categories. Moreover, they lack explicit cross-modal interaction and are vulnerable to noisy support features, further degrading visual prior quality. To address these issues, we propose the Multi-Text Guided Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation Network (MTGNet), a dual-branch framework that enhances segmentation performance by fusing diverse textual prompts to refine textual priors and guide the cross-modal optimization of visual priors. Specifically, we design a Multi-Textual Prior Refinement (MTPR) module that suppresses interference and aggregates complementary semantic cues to enhance foreground activation and expand semantic coverage for structurally complex objects. We introduce a Text Anchor Feature Fusion (TAFF) module, which leverages multi-text embeddings as semantic anchors to facilitate the transfer of discriminative local prototypes from support images to query images, thereby improving semantic consistency and alleviating intra-class variations. Furthermore, a Foreground Confidence-Weighted Attention (FCWA) module is presented to enhance visual prior robustness by leveraging internal self-similarity within support foreground features. It adaptively down-weights inconsistent regions and effectively suppresses interference in the query segmentation process. Extensive experiments on standard FSS benchmarks validate the effectiveness of MTGNet. In the 1-shot setting, it achieves 76.8% mIoU on PASCAL-5i and 57.4% on COCO-20i, with notable improvements in folds exhibiting high intra-class variations.

An Event-triggered System for Social Persuasion and Danger Alert in Elder Home Monitoring

In the study, the physical state and mental state of elders are both considered, and an event-triggered system has developed to detect events: watch dog, danger notice and photo link. By adopting GMM background modeling, the motion behavior of visitors and elders can be detected in the watch dog event and danger notice event respectively. Experiments set in home scenarios and 5 families participated in the experiments for detecting and recording three types of events from their life activities. In addition, the captured images were analyzed using SVM machine learning. For lack of technical experiences of elders, an intuitive operation as normal life activity was designed to create communication between elder and relatives via social media.

Talk, Snap, Complain: Validation-Aware Multimodal Expert Framework for Fine-Grained Customer Grievances

Existing approaches to complaint analysis largely rely on unimodal, short-form content such as tweets or product reviews. This work advances the field by leveraging multimodal, multi-turn customer support dialogues, where users often share both textual complaints and visual evidence (e.g., screenshots, product photos) to enable fine-grained classification of complaint aspects and severity. We introduce VALOR, a Validation-Aware Learner with Expert Routing, tailored for this multimodal setting. It employs a multi-expert reasoning setup using large-scale generative models with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting for nuanced decision-making. To ensure coherence between modalities, a semantic alignment score is computed and integrated into the final classification through a meta-fusion strategy. In alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), the proposed framework supports SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) by advancing AI-driven tools for robust, scalable, and context-aware service infrastructure. Further, by enabling structured analysis of complaint narratives and visual context, it contributes to SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) by promoting more responsive product design and improved accountability in consumer services. We evaluate VALOR on a curated multimodal complaint dataset annotated with fine-grained aspect and severity labels, showing that it consistently outperforms baseline models, especially in complex complaint scenarios where information is distributed across text and images. This study underscores the value of multimodal interaction and expert validation in practical complaint understanding systems. Resources related to data and codes are available here: https://github.com/sarmistha-D/VALOR

PFAvatar: Pose-Fusion 3D Personalized Avatar Reconstruction from Real-World Outfit-of-the-Day Photos

We propose PFAvatar (Pose-Fusion Avatar), a new method that reconstructs high-quality 3D avatars from Outfit of the Day(OOTD) photos, which exhibit diverse poses, occlusions, and complex backgrounds. Our method consists of two stages: (1) fine-tuning a pose-aware diffusion model from few-shot OOTD examples and (2) distilling a 3D avatar represented by a neural radiance field (NeRF). In the first stage, unlike previous methods that segment images into assets (e.g., garments, accessories) for 3D assembly, which is prone to inconsistency, we avoid decomposition and directly model the full-body appearance. By integrating a pre-trained ControlNet for pose estimation and a novel Condition Prior Preservation Loss (CPPL), our method enables end-to-end learning of fine details while mitigating language drift in few-shot training. Our method completes personalization in just 5 minutes, achieving a 48x speed-up compared to previous approaches. In the second stage, we introduce a NeRF-based avatar representation optimized by canonical SMPL-X space sampling and Multi-Resolution 3D-SDS. Compared to mesh-based representations that suffer from resolution-dependent discretization and erroneous occluded geometry, our continuous radiance field can preserve high-frequency textures (e.g., hair) and handle occlusions correctly through transmittance. Experiments demonstrate that PFAvatar outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction fidelity, detail preservation, and robustness to occlusions/truncations, advancing practical 3D avatar generation from real-world OOTD albums. In addition, the reconstructed 3D avatar supports downstream applications such as virtual try-on, animation, and human video reenactment, further demonstrating the versatility and practical value of our approach.

Scalable Vision-Guided Crop Yield Estimation

Precise estimation and uncertainty quantification for average crop yields are critical for agricultural monitoring and decision making. Existing data collection methods, such as crop cuts in randomly sampled fields at harvest time, are relatively time-consuming. Thus, we propose an approach based on prediction-powered inference (PPI) to supplement these crop cuts with less time-consuming field photos. After training a computer vision model to predict the ground truth crop cut yields from the photos, we learn a ``control function" that recalibrates these predictions with the spatial coordinates of each field. This enables fields with photos but not crop cuts to be leveraged to improve the precision of zone-wide average yield estimates. Our control function is learned by training on a dataset of nearly 20,000 real crop cuts and photos of rice and maize fields in sub-Saharan Africa. To improve precision, we pool training observations across different zones within the same first-level subdivision of each country. Our final PPI-based point estimates of the average yield are provably asymptotically unbiased and cannot increase the asymptotic variance beyond that of the natural baseline estimator -- the sample average of the crop cuts -- as the number of fields grows. We also propose a novel bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrap to construct accompanying confidence intervals. Even in zones with as few as 20 fields, the point estimates show significant empirical improvement over the baseline, increasing the effective sample size by as much as 73% for rice and by 12-23% for maize. The confidence intervals are accordingly shorter at minimal cost to empirical finite-sample coverage. This demonstrates the potential for relatively low-cost images to make area-based crop insurance more affordable and thus spur investment into sustainable agricultural practices.